Story was waste of students' time

Published 12:15 am, Sunday, October 16, 2011

It was all there in the first paragraph of the story on Page 1 on Oct. 9. Flat-screen TVs, giftcards, T-shirts, catered meals, apartments with luxury amenities and (stop the presses!) bottled water. Good grief. What the heck is going on here?

"Tens of thousands" of taxpayer dollars being misspent on the GlobalFoundries project in Malta. Any reasonable reader should be outraged.

But, if that reasonable reader were to read your hit piece all the way to paragraph 30 on Page 8, the reader would find that explanations for these items were all, dare I say, eminently reasonable.

The gift cards and flat-screen TVs were incentives to enhance worker productivity, the apartments housed design and construction experts flown in from around the world, the bottled water was needed before running water was available at the site, and so on. As a taxpayer, I say that these expenditures seem pretty reasonable to me.

The real story behind your hit piece can be gleaned from the sidebar about GlobalFoundries' initial denial of your request for documents. Eventually, it gave you more than 14,000 documents. So many documents that you brought on 10 University at Albany journalism students to comb through the documents, looking for incriminating items like gift cards and bottled water.

The Times Union told GlobalFoundries to jump, and its big crime was that it didn't ask "How high?"

Your hit piece was designed to teach GlobalFoundries a lesson. Too bad you wasted the time of 10 journalism students to help you do it.